Sheri Graner Ray Knows What a Girl Wants

Sheri Graner Ray is a gamer, and a woman. And at the May 28th International Game Developer’s Association (IGDA) meeting that took place at Full Sail, our gaming students and staff arrived in droves to hear her roar.

Currently a senior designer for Sony Online Entertainment, Graner Ray began her lecture by revealing that she is currently working as lead designer on a new multiplayer title. Yet she stayed true to the infamous secrecy protocol of the gaming industry by quickly stating, “That is all I can tell you about it.” Even though she couldn’t disclose the details of her current project, Graner Ray did have some advice for the assembled audience about what women want and need… In a game, that is.

To clear up any misconceptions about her role as a woman in the world of gaming, she continued her introduction by saying, “Yes, I am a woman. Most importantly though, I am a hardcore gamer. I spend over twenty hours per week gaming, and this is the only industry where I could put fifteen years of writing D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) games on my resume as legitimate experience.”

Graner Ray then launched into a short gaming history lesson, beginning with family oriented fare like Pong and ending with the male-dominated market of today. Somewhere in between these extremes, the industry wondered, “What about the girls?” But following several successful Barbie titles, this development left the industry with a stereotypical definition of what female gamers were craving – fashion, shopping, and makeup. However, what works for Cosmo does not always work well in the world of consoles and computers. “Barbie was both a blessing and a curse,” explained Graner Ray. “It worked well for girls ages six to ten, but it turned the market of women into this genre. That’s a little like saying Japan will only buy WWII flight sims.”

Today, the gaming industry is growing at a blinding rate, driving development companies and publishers to search for new gaming markets. Graner Ray has been conducting gaming research for many years, writing the watershed Gender Inclusive Game Design – Expanding the Market in the process, and she has discovered that women ages fifteen to twenty-five control at least fourteen billion dollars of disposal income per year. Graner Ray boldly announced to the IDGA audience that she wants in on that cash, and she wasted no time telling our future gamers how they too can get a piece of this largely untapped market.

To open the playing field to these potential consumers, Graner Ray believes that game developers must first begin to create games that are gender inclusive – games that appeal to both men and women. However, the solution is a bit more complicated than just wrapping a game tailored for men in pink packaging. It requires specific, deliberate, industry wide changes in gaming structure. Graner Ray spoke about specific areas that need to be explored in order for this transformation to occur – things like learning styles, error punishment, avatar design, and communication methods.

For starters, Graner Ray believes that gaming companies need to be familiar with the ways in which learning styles differ for men and women. During her studies, she has discovered that while males tend to be explorative by taking risks, females prefer a learning method called modeling, wherein they are allowed to mimic the actions that will be required of them in the game. Titles today mainly facilitate male learning patterns and Graner Ray offered a simple solution to this problem. “Always allow for both learning styles in a tutorial,” she said. Sheri is confident that allowing gamers to see how to play before they begin playing will vastly improve female interest.

Another factor that Graner Ray singled out as a driving force in making games gender inclusive is having the victory conditions identified in the game. Loss of life and other irretrievable losses are effective in keeping some male players challenged, but female gamers will tend to stay more interested if nothing irretrievable is taken away from them during game play. To provide a comfort zone for females, Graner Ray suggests letting the user know what they’re up against before they engage in play. “We need to look at how we’re treating our players when they fail and then identify the victory conditions for the titles we’re selling.”

Graner Ray covered a number of other factors that are integral to moving the industry toward gender inclusive gaming before ending with a discussion on gaming language. When it comes to the language that is prevalent in the popular game titles of today, Graner Ray finds that most women can’t relate due to the use rough language and the lack of relationship building. “Check your … text for formality and rapport-building language,” she suggested to the audience. “See that you’re trying to build a rapport with your audience and with your player so that you can build a relationship with your female audience.”

Graner Ray knows that drawing a female audience to gaming is dependent upon continuing to educate game designers about how they can appeal to this potential consumer. Above all, she believes that the gaming industry must pay attention to the barriers that are keeping women at bay. “We can look at what we’re doing today," she concluded, "and identify the barriers in our titles that are keeping women from accessing our games... and then we can remove them.”